Continuing Revelation

Lenten Practice: Lectio DivinaDaily Act: Pay attention to God’s continuing revelation. How is the Living Word being spoken today through loved ones, nature, and your life?Weekly Prayer Phrase: Repeat this phrase slowly as you breathe deeply. You may choose to memorize this phrase and repeat it throughout your day.

“LIVING WORD, LIVE THROUGH ME.”

By Katie Harmon-McLaughlin

I desire and resist this deeper seeing. What is unresolved in me rushes to slam shut the awareness door. Gazing upon the divine presence written in all living things costs my transformation. It is also my liberation, but change doesn’t always feel that way at first.

I won’t lie. This God-life can be daunting and unpredictable. To live in the Spirit of the One who is continuously being revealed means something like I can’t get too comfortable in any one place for too long. I can’t put up fences around my beliefs for a while. I can’t lay a foundation around just one experience and call it faith enough. To imagine that I am created in the image of this God is too staggering to comprehend!

This may be overwhelming to consider, this immensity of mystery, but what is revealed is so intimately relational that there is assurance even as there is humility. What we find never says to us- you don’t matter. It is always an invitation to belong. It is always an invitation to enter more deeply into the marrow of this life. It is always an invitation to become more fully alive.

So many times in our heritage, our ancestors have been tempted to build campsites and altars around a place of holy encounter only to discover that the God they desired to see had moved along to another place, doing a new thing. We can stay stubborn in stagnation of ritual or belief, but if we want relationship we are called to be a people on the move- attentive to the Divine who is being written in all things.

Sometimes this requires some dying of old assumptions and attitudes and beliefs. It requires a releasing of anything you are holding too tightly. It may crash through your fences and wreck your foundations. It will cost your transformation, but is also your liberation. If you are seeking the Living God, you are in for a wild ride!

It is not a chase as much as it is a dance, swirling through the world with this holy partner, wrapped up in each movement as the beloved of God.

In relationship with the continuously revealing God, what is unresolved in me is named holy, creation, sacred mystery beckoning in love.

“God writes the Gospel, not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.”- Martin Luther

“Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?” –St. Augustine

“We bloomed in spring. Our bodies are the leaves of God.” St. Teresa of Avila